Rust 0.9, Node.js tech support and Koa for Node – Snippets

Rust hits 0.9: The Mozilla Rust developers have released Rust 0.9 and there’s a lot new in this release. A clean up of pointer types (handy guide here), an “Any” typing trait for on-demand dynamic types and threading (green and native) pushed out to a library. Next release will be a 0.10 though 1.0 is a 2014 target. I’m waiting for Servo, the browser being built in Rust, to make a tangible appearance but it does look like Rust has development momentum at least.

Joyent turns on Node support: Joyent has blogged its commercial Node.js support is now live. Announced back in early December, Joyent now has a “Core” support offering for all comers (at $990/month) and a “Cloud” support offering for users of its hosting services. It’s a milestone for Node when commercial support appears and Joyent, as the home of Node, should be in the best position to offer that. Joyent aren’t first to do this though; StrongLoop have been offering Node.js support for a while in the form of their supported distro StrongNode.

Koa for Node: An interesting article over at the Dailyjs looks at Koa, a web middleware framework for Node.js which runs with Node 0.11.9 and uses ES6 promises. Whether it’ll disrupt the Node world of frameworks has yet to be seen. But as an aside, its interesting that, disconnected from the browser, JavaScript’s new or forthcoming functionality gets a work out a lot sooner than in the days of mostly-browser-only-JavaScript.